Nearby farmers still refer to the 17,000 acres beyond that barricade as Parchman State Penal Farm, although a metal sign insists on the offical designation: Mississippi State Penitentiary.

The physical surroundings--cotton and bean fields, the 21 scattered camps, the barbed wire enclosures--suggest that nothing much has changed since the days, early in this century, when outsiders could visit Parchman State Penal Farm only on the fifth Sunday of those rare months containing more than four.

The program in Mississippi, where the practice began informally in 1918 and is now institutionalized, receives little public attention or academic scrutiny accorded to the more recent and more limited conjugal visit policies in California, Washington, South Carolina, New Mexico, Connecticut and New York. The difference, perhaps, is that in Mississippi, where Parchman serves as the only penitentiary, nobody issued proclamations or opened up the matter for debate.

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